09. Wywiad z Davidem Paich - podczas trasy TOTO na 25-lecie zespołu

Your new tour has
started, a new album has just been released. What expectations do you have for
the next months, and what do you expect from the US release?

What's happened so far has really surpassed my expectations.
We're pleasantly surprised. We have loyal fans out there, we have a large
fanbase, also because of our website. We know they stick with us. And they go
with us. So we're allowed to take some risks every once in a while and
challenge ourselves. We don't always have to come up with the smash single or
the smash album. We just wanna make good music for our fans. So far the rest of
the world is going good so we hope that inspires the United States to promote
the album cause that's what makes the difference, when people promote us it
sells, when they don't it doesn't. We're having fun playing a live show here.
We put 4 or 5 songs of the new album in there, usually we play like 1 or 2 of
the new album. But these are standards, classic songs. But a lot of people
don't know the stuff. When we finished the album we played it for some people
and they listened to "Bodhisattva" and some of these songs and they never heard
of them so they were like "Wow, that's a different kind of song." This isn't a
cover album to everybody. It's really not. In "Through the Looking Glass" we're
taking a look back to our beginnings, kind of full circle. These are the people
that we've met and worked with and influenced us.

Do you have plans for
US tourdates in 2003?

We're talking about doing some things this summer.
Everything's a surprise right now. We finish Europe in February and nothing's
really booked yet, there's some talk about touring this summer and doing some
stuff.

It depends on the
success of this tour and the album?

Yes, and it takes time and who you play with in combination.
Maybe opening for a bigger act. You know Pink is huge in the United States but
she opened for Lenny Kravitz. Which was a good bill, they both benefited from
each other. So that's what we need to try to do. Instead of trying to headline
in the United States trying to get on a bill with somebody.

If you look back on
these 25 years, how would you compare the band from 1977 to 2002. Besides of
the fact that you are older now, that you guys have families...

Well, the personnel changes are significant; a lot of bands
change personnel, look at Genesis with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel. It's a
different band, when you change a band it's always a different band. It was
already a different band when we did Isolation. You change one person, you
change the lead singer, you change any component of the original chemistry, and
you really got a brand new band. Like Led Zeppelin when the drummer was gone,
how can you fill that place? It's hard to do. Same thing with Jeff Porcaro and
David Hungate; that was the original band and that was the significant sound.
So Mike came in, with whom we played a lot. What we should have done on the
Isolation album was have Bobby sing it. I think it would have been a better
album with Bobby singing it; I think we wouldn't have done such a left turn.

There were rumors that
Bobby actually sang the record...

He sang about a third of the record. And then there was a
change.

There are always fans
asking if you had plans to re-release Isolation with Bobby singing it...

We may go back in there and put his voice on the album but
he hasn't sung all the songs. But we may do that because I would love to hear
how this album would sound with him. It would be a totally different album, it
would be closer to a TOTO thing. We should have changed the name of the band on
Isolation because it's so much different. But we take risks; that's what TOTO
want to do. Maybe we could release an EP with Bobby's tracks.

Is there a special
reason why you very rarely have Isolation songs in the setlist for the tours?

First of all it's a different singer and secondly that album
didn't sell a whole lot. And the fact that we had't heard it in a long time, we
just listened to it the other day and I think it's one of our best albums. But
we thought the fans didn't like it.

Oh no, Isolation is
one of the favorite albums among the fans...

Really? Knowing that now, we'll stick more from Isolation in
the set. We stuck Lion in there this time, but we didn't have time for more. In
the future, we will put more Isolation stuff in there.

A lot of fans wish
that you would do as much lead vocals on the TOTO albums as you did in the
early days of TOTO. Is there a special reason why this has changed, do you
consider yourself nowadays more as a keyboarder than a singer in the band?

I guess it's just myself when I cast people. I always like
to hear other people sing. I have a certain kind of voice within a certain
range for certain songs like "Africa", like "Spanish Steps of Rome" and stuff
like that. To me I always wanted the majority of the albums to be like with
Bobby and Luke. Balanced out. You know I may start singing more but I have to
find the right songs for me to do. To me Luke and Bobby are the real singers
and every once in a while if I come up with one or two things I'm satisfied. I
may put out a solo album of my stuff that's more like "Spanish Steps of Rome."
Strictly my stuff right there. You never know. I thought about it.

That would be a great
idea because a lot of fans request that you sing more...

That's good to know. That inspires me and motivates me!

This was actually the
next question, do you have any specific plans for a solo record?

I always said I consider TOTO my solo records. It's pretty
much what Mutt Lange does with Def Leppard and all the groups he works with.
That's his solo records. He's just not singing on them, he writes them and
plays all the parts. The songs I write the band always thought they don't
really fit in, like "Stranger in town" and "Africa". "Africa" could have been
the beginning of a solo project because it was so different and I thought I'd
save it for a solo record because it really doesn't sound like TOTO. World
Music wasn't around then. "Spanish Steps of Rome," when I first sang that down
low, people were looking at me like I was crazy. I'm a big fan of Mark Knopfler
from Dire Straits. I like his lyrics, I like that kind of singing. When I
started singing down low I was inspired to write that song, I wrote the lyrics
in one night. Very different approach for me but I really like it. I was in
Rome, I wrote the lyrics in one night, and I put the music to it and it just
came out like that. And it's one of my favorite songs that I've ever done. When
the guys listened to that they said "Why don't you sing up higher, why do you
sing so low?" I had a lot of different influences, I was in Neil Diamond's
band. I like Neil Diamond, Leonard Cohen, Mark Knopfler and Bob Dylan.

A lof of fans
especially like "Spanish Steps of Rome," so your songs are very popular, the
more obscure stuff that is not so typical...

I like to do something that really has a meaning. We're
trying to work hard on that to always put out music that has meaning.

So you're trying to
put these songs into TOTO as your special input.

Yeah, I think that's one way of looking at it.

In the late 70´s and
early 80´s the majority of the songs have been written by you, later, the other
band members became more and more songwriters as well....Did this happen on
purpose or did it just happen?

No, we always planned that from the beginning. Beatles and
Fleetwood Mac were my kind of blueprints for that. Just to have two or three
singers and everybody writes in all combinations. I don't care who it is. I get
tired if I hear one person and they write all that stuff. So I encouraged
people to write. Bobby wrote, Steve Porcaro wrote a little bit, and I
encouraged all of them to write so you didn't always just get my perspective of
the sound. Cause what we hear with TOTO is a combination of writers and it
makes things more interesting.

Did the song writing
process change over the years?

It's always been multiple ways. There are really no set
rules. Sometimes I'm in the shower and I hear a piece of a song and Luke
finishes it. Or Jeff Porcaro finished the lyrics. Or sometimes, like with "Jake
to the Bone," we're all in a room and we write that together as band song.
Sometimes I have a whole finished song and I bring it in or Lukather has a
whole finished song. Or sometimes two or three of the guys work on a song like
"Dave's Gone Skiing," I wasn't there and I came back, so there's really no rule
when it comes to combinations.

Last year you have
produced the last Boz Scaggs album "Dig." How was working with Boz Scaggs on
this record again?

That was great, one of the best experiences that I've ever
had. After all this time, we wanted actually do it again. It's hard because
corporate people think we make a product like McDonalds Hamburgers or Kellogg's
Cornflakes. They wanted us to put another "Silk Degrees" album out. And you
can't really do that. Boz went into a different direction and I formed TOTO.
After all the time evolved we wanted to get back together and it was really fun
working with him because we had no rules whatsoever. With Boz Scaggs and Danny
Kortchmar we played all instruments, I played bass on the whole album, except
for "Just Go" which Nathan East played bass on. I played most of the keyboards,
Kortchmar did most of the drum things. We're not into the musician's kind of
thing like you have to have real musicians on it. The fact that we're playing
the stuff makes it real musicians. So it was very fun. Boz outdid himself with
the lyrics. He really spent a lot of time on the lyrics. We did it on Pro-Tools
and worked with Steve MacMillan and John Jessel on this record and Elliot
Scheiner. I just can't say enough how fun it was. I learned a lot working on
the album working with Danny Kortchmar. It was just three people working on
this album, myself, Boz and Danny Kortchmar, making the whole album. We became
a small band of ourselves creating the whole album. So we're very proud of
that. I really love the album.

But it was not like
going back to the Seventies but creating something new...

Well we started out like that, I grabbed some of Boz' stuff,
you gotta hear the original versions of this stuff, it doesn't sound anything
like this, like "Desire" sounded totally different. I was thinking, if I would
do "Silk Degrees" right now, what would I do? And so "Desire" is a case of
that. All the songs we hear have an urban sound. We kind of updated a lot of
the tracks. That's what I added to Boz Scaggs's "Silk Degrees". He was very
Texas pop/blues, and I came in and we added the urban thing to it.

So it was kind of
modernizing all that...

Yeah, taking out the old school and make it like "what would
the record sound now." We tried to keep it current, keep it musical but street.

So would you like to
work more as a producer for other people in the future or was it just a single
project for a friend?

Yeah, it was kind of a special thing for him, but if I found
the right project, the right person, I'd like doing it. Producing albums is
hard because you have to have a love of labour. Unless you have a situation
like Glenn Ballard. When Glenn Ballard was with Dave Matthews, they wrote the
album in 6 weeks because they were both writers and they're very fast, and they
sat another month or two and recorded the entire album. If you can find someone
like that, a real other artist that you're working with... Sometimes when you
produce the producer becomes the artists a nd has to do everything. The artist
hardly does anything. The artist comes in and sings on it. That's about it. But
producing is fun when I get to deal with someone else like Danny Kortchmar.

Do you have any real
plans to do it again or are you just waiting for the right project to come?

Whatever happens. Boz and I were talking about doing some
more stuff. I'm mainly getting ready to doing some film scoring.

Like Steve Porcaro?

Yeah, like Steve Porcaro but more on a level like Randy
Newman, writing songs. I may start by writing songs for some movies and then
use that as a gateway to scoring for movies. I've been doing projects without
putting my name on them. When Steve and I get hired it's something that's
called "ghost" for someone. We do the work and some else gets the credit. I
just did "XXX" with Steve, we did the last 20 minutes of the movie, we wrote
the music, all the music you hear there is me and Steve. It says Randy Edelman
but we did most of the music.

So did you ever
consider after "Dune" doing another project like this again with the whole band
scoring a movie?

Yeah, but that was mainly me with Dune, when we did it, I
ended up doing most of the work. But we were hired as "TOTO" to do the thing.
But I would consider doing something like that again if it's the right project.

So it was a good
experience...

It was good, very unusual working with David Lynch, cause he
is different, I don't think it could get any tougher than that.

But it's very
interesting listening to that music and a lot of fans request songs like
"Desert Theme" or "Take my hand" and they would like to hear that in concert...

You might hear a little bit of Dune in the show. That's what
we were trying to do on this tour, add those little quirky things.

You have some new
equipment on tour this year.

Yeah, I'm very happy. You get attached to a keyboard rig and
I was doing fine and I was using a lot of the same piano stuff for the last ten
years. But technology has changed a whole lot in the last ten years. With
synthesizers I was afraid to jump to the next level but Korg has set new
standards with the Triton. I did 90% of Boz Scagg's record with the Triton. And
Yamaha came up with a thing called Motif 8, which is the new self-contained
synthesizer. And that's all I'm using. I have the Motif 8 and the Triton. It
has all the Hammond, string sounds, and everything you can think of can be
played with these two synthesizers. That's really very cool. The sounds are
great and the touch is great.

There was a lot of
talk about the so called "box-set" some years ago. What´s the "status" of this
project, is this "on hold," do you have this still in mind?

That's a documentary work in progress. The first of the box
set that didn't go into the box set was TOTO XX. That's what you have to do
when you do a TOTO box set, we have to go back to our archives and we have
thousands of tapes. And you have to pull them out and bake them. For each one
you have to listen to them and transfer them and listen to the parts. So we're
going through all of our tapes, and listening to find what little parts and
jams we did, what we could put on a feature record. And also I don't only want
to make an audio thing, I wanna make it special, I want to have a DVD in there,
a combination of documentary and records in there. We haven't shot a lot of
live footage and we did that intentionally to keep us off TV so people have to
come to our concerts to see us. It takes a lot of time doing it the way we want
to do it because we want to do it, we don't want to turn it over to somebody.
So the fans have to be very patient with us.

Do you have detailed
plans for a new album with original material after this tour?

It's the next obvious move! There're no plans, however with
Toto, everything is a surprise. We may do part 2 of this record here and then
hang on to it and then write an original album, we don't know until we get in
there.